President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with North Korean defectors in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, in Washington.

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

At a Glance

The Trump administration continues to try to make it easier to drill on public lands.

The latest example is a memo issued by the Interior Department last week.

New rules would shorten the process to get leases approved for drilling on public lands.

President Donald Trump's administration is doing everything it can to allow for more oil and gas drilling on public lands, and a recent memo is just another example.

The Interior Department said in the memo that it wants its field offices "to simplify and streamline the leasing process". This would allow the federal government to avoid environmental reviews of the consequences drilling would have on wildlife. The changes would shorten the process to get a lease approved for drilling on public lands, and it would also limit public protests of such leases to just 10 days.

The memo was made public one day after the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a release complimenting itself about the 86 percent increase in money generated from oil and gas lease sales in 2017 because of expanded drilling permission on public lands.

"Today's announced sweeping change to BLM's oil and gas leasing program threatens irreplaceable federal public lands and resources in Utah and across the West," Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told the Washington Post.

The administration has also made attempts to dramatically open up offshore drilling in recent weeks despite pushback from state leaders who disagree with the decision. Some states, like Florida, have been able to discourage Trump from making offshore areas available for drilling, but others haven't been as successful.

Each of the last three presidents attempted to expand offshore drilling despite opposition by environmental groups, but former President Barack Obama reversed his decision after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the areas Trump has proposed opening up to offshore drilling contain some 45 billion barrels of oil, three times more oil than the western and central Gulf of Mexico have yielded since 1970.

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